[ry_goody]

So I was looking to buy a new headphone cable and was trying to decide between headphile.com and ALO audio.
 
Headphile has always seemed to me to just be a guy making audio and headphone cables out of materials that, people who believe in cables, know work well. That being just high purity solid core silver and high purity copper, no tricks or fancy buzzwords. Just plain old, single strand, high purity, solid core, copper and silver in a nice casing, done for you, so you don't have to do that, and then sold at a fairly reasonable price.
 
But then I was looking at ALO and there fancy reference 16 cable http://www.aloaudio.com/reference-16-headphone-cable and it seems to me they have took a bunch of high purity, fibered copper cable, some of it silver plated, and woven a ton of it together, 8 fiber strands each way. They then sell this as there flagship? This throws up a bunch of red flags to me. For one, isn't superior sonic performance found only in solid core silver cables and not silver plated cables? Then secondly, isn't adding unnecessary gauge to an electrical wire detrimental to the signal?
 
Then I stumbled across this on ALO http://www.aloaudio.com/cables/home-audio/digital $200 USB cable. Seriously? Digital is Digital. Thats when I had to think ALO is being over the top and crossing the scam line.
 
But I post this because I'm not certain. Anyone have any experience with this or any thoughts?

 

[cel4145]

Since you posted here, you'll find someone that will champion the benefits of $200 USB cables.

If you post in an audio forum where opinions are strictly based on scientific principles, everyone will tell you to buy something like this instead: http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-A-Male-B-Male-Cable-Meters/dp/B00BCWA6TK/.

 

[ry_goody]

I just want to know, has anyone actually done any real tests on such a usb cable?

 

[cel4145]

I just want to know, has anyone actually done any real tests on such a usb cable?

Why would anyone need to run "real tests" on a $200 USB cable if a <$10 USB cable can perfectly reproduce the audio stream. If you believe "digital is digital" as you said above, if you compare that cable to a working cheap cable, either there is no difference, or you will hear what you want to hear.

 

[Chris J]

July 2013 issue of HiFi News shows cleaner square waves in the expensive cables than in the cheap cable they tested.

 

[ry_goody]

Why would anyone need to run "real tests" on a $200 USB cable if a <$10 USB cable can perfectly reproduce the audio stream. If you believe "digital is digital" as you said above, if you compare that cable to a working cheap cable, either there is no difference, or you will hear what you want to hear.

A real test to me would be something that records the digital binary signal sent over the cable. Then you compare the two streams of binary data to see how different they are.
 
Theoretically there could be missing or distorted bits due to signal degradation over distance, or static interference. But a digital signal with missing bits of data is a corrupted signal. 

 

[ry_goody]

July 2013 issue of HiFi News shows cleaner square waves in the expensive cables than in the cheap cable they tested.

In USB cables?

 

[Chris J]

  In USB cables?

 
Yes sir.
USB cables.
The cheap cable had a rather nasty looking square wave.

 

[ry_goody]

   
Yes sir.
USB cables.
The cheap cable had a rather nasty looking square wave.

Interesting, were they recording like the actual electrical signal over the USB cable directly?
 
Or was it being fed into a DAC and then outputting a square wave from the DAC?
 
Also, which DAC? Theoretically a USB cable stretched to far could get voltage fluctuations or interference, causing a corrupted byte package. But the USB receiver should be able to correct for this.

 

[seeteeyou]

.

 

[cel4145]

A real test to me would be something that records the digital binary signal sent over the cable. Then you compare the two streams of binary data to see how different they are.

Or you just test to see if the cheaper cable reproduces an exact copy of the original signal at the other end. If so, no reason to test the more expensive cable. Who cares if it is also perfect since it costs $200. LOL

 

[Lappy27]

I tried:
 
Generic cable
 
WireWorld Starlight 7 : $110
 
Transparent Performance : $100
 
Silnote Poseidon : $595 but $250-300 street price
 
Oyaide Continental 5S : $300
 
Audioquest Diamond : $500
 
AudioSensibility Statement USB : $350
 
Transparent Premium : $550
 
All these cables do sound different. Digital or not. Starlight and Transparent Performance, same price but complete opposite sounding and not in a subtle way trust me.
 
My favorite and still in my system: Transparent Premium. Head and shoulders over all the others. Audiosensibility beeing 2nd. The best value IMHO followed by Silnote.
 
Now, be prepared to read alot of comments from science vigilantes who will make fun of my REAL WORLD EXPERIMENTATION. They for the vast majority, never been willing to even compare generic and expensive cables. I did.

 

[ry_goody]

  I tried:
 
Generic cable
 
WireWorld Starlight 7 : $110
 
Transparent Performance : $100
 
Silnote Poseidon : $595 but $250-300 street price
 
Oyaide Continental 5S : $300
 
Audioquest Diamond : $500
 
AudioSensibility Statement USB : $350
 
Transparent Premium : $550
 
All these cables do sound different. Digital or not. Starlight and Transparent Performance, same price but complete opposite sounding and not in a subtle way trust me.
 
My favorite and still in my system: Transparent Premium. Head and shoulders over all the others. Audiosensibility beeing 2nd. The best value IMHO followed by Silnote.
 
Now, be prepared to read alot of comments from science vigilantes who will make fun of my REAL WORLD EXPERIMENTATION. They for the vast majority, never been willing to even compare generic and expensive cables. I did.

 
Now this is even more out of control.
 
I could believe, very easily, in fact I do suspect and have experienced this, extremely cheap USB cables may conduct so poorly, or may be too long, or have interference, the voltage fluctuates in the cable causing bits to get corrupted. When I first got a USB DAC I used a really cheap, long USB cable and periodically the DAC would skip a sample, as most likely a bit packet got corrupted due to the inability of the cable to carry a signal with little fluctuation. A nice, shorter, usb cable fixed this.
 
But at a certain point bit perfect on the other end is bit perfect, and there is no difference at that point. I mean when you copy a file to an external hard drive over a nice USB cable the file comes out exactly 100% the same as the source, otherwise it's corrupted, maybe the file might copy faster over a nicer cable, which would be an interesting test. But bit perfect is bit perfect, there would be absolutely 0 difference at that point. The only possibility that exists for what you say to be true would be if even the $500 cables are not achieving absolutely 'bit perfect' transmission and there are still samples slightly out of sync, and the receiving DAC does not correct this, and the material composition of the cable actually affects the transmission of bits through the cable by the voltage and amperage representation of the bit being affected predictably the same by the different materials. But you can test for this by recording a byte stream send over a usb cable and comparing it.

 

[jimmers]

July 2013 issue of HiFi News shows cleaner square waves in the expensive cables than in the cheap cable they tested.

Considering the test equipment HiFi News have (?), I thought the test procedure, just USB Eye Pattern, pretty pathetic.
The 6,500 UKP/M cable's looked insignificantly different from most of the others, all were within eye pattern spec. even the freebie (which looked better than a 70 UKP/2m one).
 
But then one writer for an English HiFi magazines, referring to USB cables, said
"Normally, when you push music through a USB cable, the data, which arrives in blocks, includes narrow bits which represents the high frequency portions of the final music,,,"
 
You be the judge.

 

[cel4145]

For anyone into $500 USB cables, this Denon AK-DL1 network cable would be a nice supplement for connecting to one's router for improving audio quality of streaming music. There are some nice Amazon reviews for it